Customer Reviews

Malcolm

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Malcolm is a novel which, because of its measured simplicity, is extraordinarily complex. It is a highly stylised fable in which the surreal is presented as entirely conventional. There is an extreme sense of disconnection, of alienation. This is a depiction of a society where the individual has lost his sense of belonging and where meaning has become arbitrary. It is also extremely funny.

The story begins in picaresque fashion, with Malcolm being introduced in successive chapters to a range of unusual individuals. Malcolm is first presented to us sitting on a bench day after day, waiting. Just waiting. He has lost his father - literally so, as he doesn't appear to have died, he simply isn't there - which one would ordinarily take to be symbolic of the end of childhood or reaching maturity, but this clearly isn't the case with Malcolm. Paradox is at the heart of this novel. Malcolm is an innocent who cannot engage with the world. He is taken in hand by the peculiar Mr. Cox, who arranges for him to meet, in turn, a range of his acquaintances.

Malcolm orbits these people's worlds and everything shifts. Everything, that is, except Malcolm, who remains throughout impervious to the dramas building around him. These people are eccentric, extreme, anomalies, and at certain times surreal. Each of these extraordinary characters is introduced as coolly as though they were merely a range of everyday functionaries.

Yet all of this is told in a deliberately flat style, almost banal, and the characterisation is strictly two-dimensional. The characters are established as stereotypes representing different aspects of American culture - philistines and aesthetes, revealing greed, neuroticism, irreality - and through their responses and lack of responses the hopelessness at the heart of American society is revealed.

I felt the novel ended too quickly; I was still thirsty for more. Purdy probably intended for it to end abruptly. Life, Purdy may be telling us, is meaningless. Existence is absurd. It consists of events and happenings, all unavoidable, all simultaneously significant and meaningless. They touch you, wound even, ultimately kill, yet somehow existence appears to obtain in a bubble outside of the self.

One of the most poised yet hilarious books I have ever read. A shame the man has never received the literary recognition he deserves.

This book has been hailed as a comic masterpiece of irony, etc. I wish that I had enjoyed it as such, but I found it obscure, utterly lacking in writing style, and full of inexplicably abrupt plot changes.

The plot revolves around a pretty boy, apparently orphaned, who is discovered on a park bench and introduced to a series of bizarre people. They all want to own him in some way, which simply doesn't make sense as there is nothing interesting about him whatsoever. He just blunders on, into greater and more improbable situations, none of which I found funny in the slightest. It is like reading a novel by Eugene Ionescu, without the humor and surrealism.

In other words, I just didn't get it and don't think it is worth the effort. I would never have gotten through it except for the fact that I grabbed it for a long flight and had nothing else to read.

Not recommended.